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Researcher profile

Biswa Sengupta

Biswa Sengupta contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceMultiagent SystemsComputer Vision

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Representation Without Reward: A JEPA Audit for LLM Fine-Tuning

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) propose that a model should learn more useful abstractions when trained to predict latent representations rather than observed outputs. For autoregressive language-model fine-tuning the principle entails a stricter requirement: the induced hidden-state geometry must reach the language-model head \emph{and} improve the decoded task metric. We test that requirement under a fixed Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct LoRA harness on natural-language-to-regex generation, comparing twenty-two training-time auxiliaries across trajectory-shape regularisation, distributional constraints, predictor/target asymmetry, Fisher-metric Jacobi residuals, and a decoder-visible JEPA objective constructed to lie in cross-entropy's positive cone. The empirical answer is a structured null: several auxiliaries clear single-cell paired $α= 0.10$ without correction (T3-Local at $Δ= +2.53$~pp, $p = 0.003$ being the strongest), but none survives Bonferroni or Holm--Bonferroni at the relevant family-wise threshold, even though many change curvature, anisotropy, variance, and gradient direction. Decoder-visible JEPA yields the first positive auxiliary--cross-entropy gradient cosine in the study, yet exact match remains inside seed noise; a full-fine-tuning replication of the same auxiliary at $n = 5$ seeds reproduces the null on both benchmarks (TURK: $Δ= +0.04$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.96$; SYNTH: $Δ= +0.52$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.28$), so the null is robust across LoRA and full fine-tuning for the decoder-visible construction. Hidden-state representation work and decoded-task accuracy are therefore weakly coupled in this regime; we accordingly reframe LLM-domain JEPA evaluation as a coupling problem, in which the operative question is under which metrics useful hidden geometry becomes decoder-visible task signal.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Hierarchically Structured Scheduling and Execution of Tasks in a Multi-Agent Environment

In a warehouse environment, tasks appear dynamically. Consequently, a task management system that matches them with the workforce too early (e.g., weeks in advance) is necessarily sub-optimal. Also, the rapidly increasing size of the action space of such a system consists of a significant problem for traditional schedulers. Reinforcement learning, however, is suited to deal with issues requiring making sequential decisions towards a long-term, often remote, goal. In this work, we set ourselves on a problem that presents itself with a hierarchical structure: the task-scheduling, by a centralised agent, in a dynamic warehouse multi-agent environment and the execution of one such schedule, by decentralised agents with only partial observability thereof. We propose to use deep reinforcement learning to solve both the high-level scheduling problem and the low-level multi-agent problem of schedule execution. Finally, we also conceive the case where centralisation is impossible at test time and workers must learn how to cooperate in executing the tasks in an environment with no schedule and only partial observability.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Ground Decentralized Multi-Agent Communication with Contrastive Learning

For communication to happen successfully, a common language is required between agents to understand information communicated by one another. Inducing the emergence of a common language has been a difficult challenge to multi-agent learning systems. In this work, we introduce an alternative perspective to the communicative messages sent between agents, considering them as different incomplete views of the environment state. Based on this perspective, we propose a simple approach to induce the emergence of a common language by maximizing the mutual information between messages of a given trajectory in a self-supervised manner. By evaluating our method in communication-essential environments, we empirically show how our method leads to better learning performance and speed, and learns a more consistent common language than existing methods, without introducing additional learning parameters.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Infer Belief Embedded Communication

In multi-agent collaboration problems with communication, an agent's ability to encode their intention and interpret other agents' strategies is critical for planning their future actions. This paper introduces a novel algorithm called Intention Embedded Communication (IEC) to mimic an agent's language learning ability. IEC contains a perception module for decoding other agents' intentions in response to their past actions. It also includes a language generation module for learning implicit grammar during communication with two or more agents. Such grammar, by construction, should be compact for efficient communication. Both modules undergo conjoint evolution - similar to an infant's babbling that enables it to learn a language of choice by trial and error. We utilised three multi-agent environments, namely predator/prey, traffic junction and level-based foraging and illustrate that such a co-evolution enables us to learn much quicker (50%) than state-of-the-art algorithms like MADDPG. Ablation studies further show that disabling the inferring belief module, communication module, and the hidden states reduces the model performance by 38%, 60% and 30%, respectively. Hence, we suggest that modelling other agents' behaviour accelerates another agent to learn grammar and develop a language to communicate efficiently. We evaluate our method on a set of cooperative scenarios and show its superior performance to other multi-agent baselines. We also demonstrate that it is essential for agents to reason about others' states and learn this ability by continuous communication.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

On Deep Neural Network Calibration by Regularization and its Impact on Refinement

Deep neural networks have been shown to be highly miscalibrated. often they tend to be overconfident in their predictions. It poses a significant challenge for safety-critical systems to utilise deep neural networks (DNNs), reliably. Many recently proposed approaches to mitigate this have demonstrated substantial progress in improving DNN calibration. However, they hardly touch upon refinement, which historically has been an essential aspect of calibration. Refinement indicates separability of a network's correct and incorrect predictions. This paper presents a theoretically and empirically supported exposition reviewing refinement of a calibrated model. Firstly, we show the breakdown of expected calibration error (ECE), into predicted confidence and refinement under the assumption of over-confident predictions. Secondly, linking with this result, we highlight that regularization based calibration only focuses on naively reducing a model's confidence. This logically has a severe downside to a model's refinement as correct and incorrect predictions become tightly coupled. Lastly, connecting refinement with ECE also provides support to existing refinement based approaches which improve calibration but do not explain the reasoning behind it. We support our claims through rigorous empirical evaluations of many state of the art calibration approaches on widely used datasets and neural networks. We find that many calibration approaches with the likes of label smoothing, mixup etc. lower the usefulness of a DNN by degrading its refinement. Even under natural data shift, this calibration-refinement trade-off holds for the majority of calibration methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Reinforcement Learning for Location-Aware Scheduling

Recent techniques in dynamical scheduling and resource management have found applications in warehouse environments due to their ability to organize and prioritize tasks in a higher temporal resolution. The rise of deep reinforcement learning, as a learning paradigm, has enabled decentralized agent populations to discover complex coordination strategies. However, training multiple agents simultaneously introduce many obstacles in training as observation and action spaces become exponentially large. In our work, we experimentally quantify how various aspects of the warehouse environment (e.g., floor plan complexity, information about agents' live location, level of task parallelizability) affect performance and execution priority. To achieve efficiency, we propose a compact representation of the state and action space for location-aware multi-agent systems, wherein each agent has knowledge of only self and task coordinates, hence only partial observability of the underlying Markov Decision Process. Finally, we show how agents trained in certain environments maintain performance in completely unseen settings and also correlate performance degradation with floor plan geometry.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Switch Trajectory Transformer with Distributional Value Approximation for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

We propose SwitchTT, a multi-task extension to Trajectory Transformer but enhanced with two striking features: (i) exploiting a sparsely activated model to reduce computation cost in multi-task offline model learning and (ii) adopting a distributional trajectory value estimator that improves policy performance, especially in sparse reward settings. These two enhancements make SwitchTT suitable for solving multi-task offline reinforcement learning problems, where model capacity is critical for absorbing the vast quantities of knowledge available in the multi-task dataset. More specifically, SwitchTT exploits switch transformer model architecture for multi-task policy learning, allowing us to improve model capacity without proportional computation cost. Also, SwitchTT approximates the distribution rather than the expectation of trajectory value, mitigating the effects of the Monte-Carlo Value estimator suffering from poor sample complexity, especially in the sparse-reward setting. We evaluate our method using the suite of ten sparse-reward tasks from the gym-mini-grid environment.We show an improvement of 10% over Trajectory Transformer across 10-task learning and obtain up to 90% increase in offline model training speed. Our results also demonstrate the advantage of the switch transformer model for absorbing expert knowledge and the importance of value distribution in evaluating the trajectory.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

The Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery Problem: MAPF, MARL and Its Warehouse Applications

We study two state-of-the-art solutions to the multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem based on different principles -- multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Specifically, a recent MAPF algorithm called conflict-based search (CBS) and a current MARL algorithm called shared experience actor-critic (SEAC) are studied. While the performance of these algorithms is measured using quite different metrics in their separate lines of work, we aim to benchmark these two methods comprehensively in a simulated warehouse automation environment.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access